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Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

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Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#51

Post by lmm »

the_af wrote: post #45
lmm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are better options on the tooling. Eclipse rather than IDEA, Maven rather than SBT. Not perfect by any means, and the compiler is slow, but good enough to work with day-to-day. The library ecosystem is growing every day, and the community is starting to recognize the importance of good documentation. See e.g. the Cats project, with a big emphasis on that. Code readability in general, rough edges, and things tha…

Is Eclipse (Scala IDE) better than IntelliJ now? About a year ago people convinced me to switch to IntelliJ because Scala IDE was totally unusable , full of spurious compilation errors and useless refactor that introduced random symbols instead of doing its job. So has the situation been reversed now?

Eclipse still has problems, its refactoring doesn't really work, and the UI locks up every so often, but its compiler is substantially more reliable than IntelliJ's. It's a case of picking your poison really.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#52

Post by mike_hearn »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #39
16bytes wrote: post #25

"Lightbend" as a name is I think the least interesting part of this announcement. So, Typesafe pivots away from being the company behind Scala to being the company behind the "Reactive Platform (tm)". I didn't understand the motivation at first--they announced they were going to do this a while ago--but this sentence sums it up: > ... with more than half of our customers representing traditional Java enterprises. We…

Rust could be the future, but I just don't see it for Kotlin. Scala's not perfect, but moving to Kotlin leaves a lot on the table. It reminds me of Swift in the way that it left out a lot of Scala at the outset, but appears to be slowly growing Scala-like functionality. At some point, I'm like, maybe life would be better if people just used Scala or languages that attempt to build on its techniques, rather than scale…

Hmm, Rust and Kotlin are targeting very different markets. I can't forsee Rust ever taking over much (if any) of the market that Java/Kotlin/Scala are going after, the cost/benefit tradeoffs are just too different.

JetBrains' strategy with Kotlin is pretty simple - take the best bits of Scala whilst not allowing anything to compromise toolchain quality or seamless Java interop. The goal being commercial success rather than research papers. It's basically a spin on the same recipe that made Java itself a success in the early days. Which is why I anticipate they'll be quite successful with it.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#53

Post by seanmcdirmid »

the_af wrote: post #44
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #13

Actually not a bad name, and it sounds more "do good" rather than mostly "prevent bad" as TypeSafe did.

On the other hand, Lightbend is so generic and bland, while TypeSafe, at least for those "in the know", has a nice technical ring to it. I guess bland & non-threatening trumps meaningful in enterprisey software. Still, very disappointing, especially if it signals a lack of focus on Scala.

Meh, if you are into the academic PL community's fixation on "preventing bad", TypeSafe is a perfect name, but as soon as you step out of that bubble, it sounds just as bland and enterprisey as say...SalesForce or PeopleSoft.

Scala isn't just a safe language, heck, it is not even an especially type safe language. But Scala allows you to do more, not do the same things significantly type safer like say...Haskell, Rust, Ada, or Agda. The name "TypeSafe" sends confusing signals in that respect. Scala does increase expressiveness without sacrificing type safety, but doesn't really focusing on going beyond that. Correcting that misconception is reasonable, and Lightbend more aptly emphasizes this "do more good" aspect.

Lightbend is a generic name, but not particularly so. It doesn't have an enterprisey feeling to it, and even if it did, that wouldn't be a negative with its potential money-paying customers. As far as the "focus on Scala" go, I think Martin Odersky has already decided to focus on Scala while the company focuses on promoting the Scala ecosystem, which is also quite reasonable and should bear fruit.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#54

Post by gclaramunt »

harveywi wrote: post #38
merb wrote: post #26

Offtopic: When people talk about the slow "Scala" compiler I always wonder what they actually do. I mean most of the time you are lightyears slower I thinking how to solve the problem than the compiler compiles. I mean changing a file compile -> looking at the result takes on my machine mostly 1-2 seconds (incremental compilation). Javac isn't lightyears faster and on go I would take nearly the same time, only full c…

The Scala compiler is excruciatingly slow for me. I frequently rely on polytypic programming techniques to prove (with a small "p") that my code is correct. The compiler simply can't keep up with me. The end result is that my state of flow is continually interrupted, or at least under assault. Bobbling my head to trance music while implicits are resolved is the only antidote that I know of.

Although I agree that scala compiler is complex and can be slow, isn't your slowness expected, given you're calculating things at compile time?

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#55

Post by gclaramunt »

Eridrus wrote: post #28
estefan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the least you'd have to be a gambling person with a penchant for long odds to continue with Scala at this point. Rubbish. Banks have gone in on scala + spark and are paying top dollar.

I was at Spark Summit East last week, and a lot of users are Python users, rather than Scala users. So I could definitely see people moving away from Scala there.

Are you sure they moved from Scala to Python or they're just Python shops using Spark? (I strongly suspect the latter)

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#56

Post by allengeorge »

djsumdog wrote: post #46
lmm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are better options on the tooling. Eclipse rather than IDEA, Maven rather than SBT. Not perfect by any means, and the compiler is slow, but good enough to work with day-to-day. The library ecosystem is growing every day, and the community is starting to recognize the importance of good documentation. See e.g. the Cats project, with a big emphasis on that. Code readability in general, rough edges, and things tha…

Maven is a hug step backwards. SBT has its issues, but maven is god awful. Going forward though on new project, I plan on using Gradle. I find it a lot easier to work with than SBT.

At least you can find documentation on Maven :/ The biggest problem with operator-heavy syntax? Google searches.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#57

Post by [deleted] »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #53
the_af wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, Lightbend is so generic and bland, while TypeSafe, at least for those "in the know", has a nice technical ring to it. I guess bland & non-threatening trumps meaningful in enterprisey software. Still, very disappointing, especially if it signals a lack of focus on Scala.

Meh, if you are into the academic PL community's fixation on "preventing bad", TypeSafe is a perfect name, but as soon as you step out of that bubble, it sounds just as bland and enterprisey as say...SalesForce or PeopleSoft. Scala isn't just a safe language, heck, it is not even an especially type safe language. But Scala allows you to do more, not do the same things significantly type safer like say...Haskell, Rust…

[deleted]

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#58

Post by Eridrus »

gclaramunt wrote: post #55
Eridrus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at Spark Summit East last week, and a lot of users are Python users, rather than Scala users. So I could definitely see people moving away from Scala there.

Are you sure they moved from Scala to Python or they're just Python shops using Spark? (I strongly suspect the latter)

Probably the latter, just pointing out that the health of Spark doesn't necessarily say a lot about Scala's health in the long term.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#59

Post by acjohnson55 »

azth wrote: post #48
acjohnson55 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust could be the future, but I just don't see it for Kotlin. Scala's not perfect, but moving to Kotlin leaves a lot on the table. It reminds me of Swift in the way that it left out a lot of Scala at the outset, but appears to be slowly growing Scala-like functionality. At some point, I'm like, maybe life would be better if people just used Scala or languages that attempt to build on its techniques, rather than scale…

> but I just don't see it for Kotlin From what I understand, Kotlin will be gaining more features slowly but steadily, similar to what you describe for Swift. I think that Kotlin's ability to integrate seamlessly into any Java codebase (at least in theory) is one of the strongest things it has going for it. Plus being backed up by Jetbrains, with very strong focus on providing a top notch IDE experience.

How would you distinguish Kotlin's and Scala's Java integration? I only use Scala, but don't use it within a larger Java codebase, but my understanding is that this is pretty straightforward.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#60

Post by airless_bar »

s_kilk wrote: post #24
allengeorge wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious: which conference, and what was the major source of the negativity?

I don't remember which conference exactly, but I do remember the gist of the complaints. In no particular order: - tooling (such as sbt) is still poor, even after years of complaints and calls to fix it. - no real roadmap for improvements to scala itself in the near future - Dotty being a diversion for the core team, detracting from scala Now, I only dabble in Scala, so I couldn't really comment on any of these, but…

The crazy thing is that all of those points are blatantly false.

- There has never been more activity in tooling as in the last half year. There are whole tooling conferences with almost 200 people attending. Tooling has been improved steadily, and people made huge progress on all fronts (ScalaIDE, IntelliJ, Ensime, SBT). Things have improved vastly.

- http://scala-lang.org/news/2.12-roadmap/ http://www.scala-lang.org/news/roadmap-next/ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scala-internals/flgn... https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scala-internals/qRgo...

- Dotty is not developed by the core team. The people working on Dotty are additional resources put into Scala, and they are helping scalac development because they share design approaches and bug fixes with the Scala team.

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